


The Hurricane That Fell In Love With The Butterfly

by fiorinda_chancellor



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bad Weather, Butterflies, Fairy Tales, Fluff, Hurricanes, Johnlock - Freeform, Johnlock Roulette, M/M, Meteorology, in a very gentle way, serious serious fluff, weather fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-31
Updated: 2012-10-31
Packaged: 2017-11-17 11:19:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/550988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiorinda_chancellor/pseuds/fiorinda_chancellor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A hurricane. A butterfly. An immediate connection. A fairy tale. And a head-first dive into unreconstructed fluff.</p><p>(Made to go with <a href="http://onthesideoftheotters.tumblr.com/post/34617285473/i-normally-dont-do-requests-til-the-weekend-but">this adorable illustration by onthesideoftheotters</a> on Tumblr (in response to a prompt from <a href="http://notreallyspookyqueen.tumblr.com/">notreallyspookyqueen</a>)</p><p>(Also <a href="http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/post/34704378107/the-hurricane-that-fell-in-love-with-the-butterfly">here</a> at the <a href="http://fiorinda-chancellor.tumblr.com/">Lotus Room blog</a> on Tumblr.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hurricane That Fell In Love With The Butterfly

Once upon another time, in the days when everybody talked about the weather and nobody did anything about it, there was a hurricane.

He was the sixteenth hurricane in what had been a very busy year. None of the others who came before him, from Andrea to Rebekah, could understand why everything seemed to be in such a rush that season: it was as if the southern Ocean was in a hurry to get more quickly to the bottom third of the alphabet. But finally the sixteenth hurricane was born, about three hundred miles northeast of Gran Canaria.

The young hurricane was unusually deep and powerful for so new a (former) tropical depression—a good two miles taller than usual from sea level to upper deck. He was also much more tightly wound than most young hurricanes, and significantly darker: his outer cloud swirled almost charcoal-black around him, though he wore a handsome wrapping of stormcloud blue around his throat, and the inmost sweep of his eyewall clouds flickered fiercely silver-grey with half-hidden lightning. He was in fact quite beautiful as hurricanes went—though such things, as usual, are in the eye of the beholder—and those able to linger long enough in his neighborhood to absorb such fine points were routinely quite taken with him.

His name, that year, was supposed to be Sebastian. The young hurricane scowled and flung himself away northward at the very idea. _“Terrible_ name,” he said. “Very negative connotations.” And he stormed off (well, what else do hurricanes do?) and soon enough found another name, one suggestive of the brightness of the cirrus associated with his uppermost cloud deck as viewed from space (that being one of the safest places to view him from).

Young Sherlock’s first course was relatively straight up the mid-Atlantic, bemusing the forecasters. But he knew from the beginning that that would always be his way. Other hurricanes might be as boring as they pleased, doing whatever the Jet Stream suggested and following the usual old stormtrack, blundering along through the warm southern waters until they bumped almost accidentally up against the great barrier of land to the west. But for Sherlock’s part, as soon as he became conscious, it was obvious to him that the generally-ignored mysteries of the greatest ocean depths first wanted some investigation. He therefore spent a good week or so dawdling about in the south equatorial waters off West Africa, examining the deep currents that ran up and down where the continental plates met.

Other hurricanes might have assumed this behavior was due to laziness or uncertainty, but they would have been quite mistaken, for they had no idea of the passion that animated their youngest brother. Sherlock was intent on doing something worth being remembered for, something more elegant or innovative than mere wholesale destruction. He had better things to do than change terrain or dump record amounts of water all over the place or simply be unexpectedly violent. _Dull!_ he thought. There had to be less boring things to do than get into one of those fruitless one-element-against-another grudge matches. Though water always won, especially when air was helping it, it took time… and meanwhile earth just sat there and played the waiting game, so that sooner or later you wound up spent and disintegrating into midwestern rainstorms with all your dreams unrealized. Sherlock was not going to be one more storm to be forgotten.

He wasn’t quite sure at first what he had in mind, and eventually just to indulge his curiosity, he headed westward and had his first brush with dry land. The creatures who live there came out to meet him, of course, sending in first balloons and then little aircraft to study his eye. He tightened it down somewhat to impress them, swirling his dark clouds theatrically about him, and they got rather alarmed by the silvery ferocity of Sherlock’s lightning and the headlong rush of his winds.

But then something happened to distract him.

Landbound creatures normally are in no position to notice this, but hurricanes (once conscious) are unusually perceptive. An entity made of wind, one that _moves_ the wind, will in turn feel what moves _in_ it, sensing it most intimately. No seabird stirs a wing through a hurricane, no torn-off leaf is tossed through it, without the hurricane knowing. (In fact some of the worst storms are slaves to this particular phenomenon, being, for their short lives, incurable sensualists and coveting the feel of every falling tree or snapped-and-crackling power line, every stripped-off roof or flooded foreshore.) And as Sherlock slipped himself up over the Delaware Peninsula and looked down at it through his eye, he first felt, and then saw, the butterfly.

It was in the air when he saw it first. It was flying, not in the sort of bobble-about-aimlessly manner of most butterflies, but methodically, purposefully, high up and on a course: as if it had filed a flight plan. Sherlock was absolutely fascinated. How could such a delicate thing be daring his winds, as if it was as robust as one of the machines the land-dwellers had sent to diagnose him? And immediately he drew the curtain walls of his eye back away from it, because he was intensely curious and didn't want to run the risk of doing the butterfly harm.

“Hullo,” Sherlock said to the butterfly.

“Hullo,” said the butterfly. “Nice day for flying!”

“It is at the moment,” Sherlock said, “but I wouldn’t count on that lasting. It’s a temporary phenomenon at best.”

“All right,” said the butterfly. “Thanks for letting me know.” And it kept flying south.

“What are you doing?” said Sherlock.

“Migrating,” said the butterfly.

“In these conditions?” Sherlock said, impressed. “You don’t look very frightened.”

“You don’t look very frightening,” said the butterfly. “You’re just air, after all. Air’s what I fly in. It’s lovely.” And he smiled at Sherlock.

“I’m water too,” said Sherlock. He didn’t know why, but he felt a little shy all of a sudden.

The butterfly shrugged. “Around the edges, maybe,” he said, “but not in here. What’s your name?”

“Sherlock.”

“Hullo, Sherlock! I’m John.”

They just looked at each other for a bit, while John kept on working steadily southward. “Where’d you come from?” John said.

“Canary Islands,” Sherlock said. “The Caribbean. Places like that.”

“That’s amazing!” John said. “What are they like?”

“Actually, fairly boring,” Sherlock said. And, _Nowhere near as interesting as you,_ Sherlock thought: for the bright hot glint of the sun on John’s wings was strangely far more interesting to him than its everyday blued-silver glitter out on the empty waters. “What do you do?”

“Visit flowers,” John said. “And a lot of weeds. I do part-time pollination. Want to see?”

“Of course!”

“All right,” John said, and glanced around him. “I need to get down to ground level. And you’ll need to slow down.”

This Sherlock did. And John folded his wings and simply dropped through the stillness at Sherlock’s eye like a scrap of falling paper until he was down to ground level, where he shortly fetched up in someone’s garden—which was deserted due to a pre-Sherlock evacuation, and rather over-decorated with several fallen trees—and began investigating the rosebushes there. “Nice selection,” he said to Sherlock, “but they’ve bred all the taste out of these things, you know? The breeders are paying too much attention to size and colour…”

Sherlock found John’s conversation fascinating, partly because it was like nothing he’d heard before—as most of what hurricanes talk about is windspeed and barometric pressure and whose rainbands are biggest. But also it was because John was interested, not only in all of those things when Sherlock talked about them, but in _him:_ details of where he’d been, what he’d seen, what he knew. John was also fun to talk to because he was so serious, so methodical about his attention to the flowers, to the things that were important to him: but he seemed to laugh a lot, enjoying what was going on around him. And when he got up in the air and flew again, he had a lot of fun there too: he tumbled and circled and flapped around for fun as well as to get where he was going.

Sherlock was almost afraid that the subject of destinations would come up again, because John had been heading south while Sherlock was heading northeast. But John just chuckled again and said, “You’re more interesting than a migration. I’m with you now.”

And so he was, and as the days went by, Sherlock got more and more used to having John around in his eye, and got more and more attached to him. And as far as he could tell, it was mutual. The only time John parted company with him even for a little was at night (when he had to sit still on something and get some sleep) or very occasionally during the day, when he got into brief flirtations with female butterflies. “Biological imperative,” John would always reassure Sherlock, who got rather jealous during these intervals: “sorry about that.” And they would go right back to whatever they’d been talking about before, and Sherlock was always extremely relieved.

They grew quite close over this short time, for they just couldn’t seem to stop talking and talking about everything. And John was always telling Sherlock he was fantastic, which was in itself kind of wonderful: for hurricanes mostly get used to being sworn at and called terrible names—at least, by almost everyone but meteorologists, with whom they have an admittedly fractious but at least long-term relationship. To make it easy for John when he was on the wing, Sherlock made sure to move as slowly as he could up the coast. To manage that, he started flattening his outer rainbands and spreading them out as widely as he could. He also dropped a lot of barometric pressure so that his eye would widen way out, in order to make sure there was no chance he might accidentally hurt John with some random unexpected gust. And the weather people all marveled at this very peculiar storm, which had started out looking so ferocious and now almost seemed to be trying to do as little damage as possible

Now Sherlock knew—in a general way—that this behavior on his part was no way for a hurricane to increase its longevity. In fact it was a recipe for fizzling out into nothing but gusts and patchy showers in fairly short order. But he didn’t care. He liked to see John’s wings in the sunlight, and watch the flicker of them as he settled about his work with the flowers: and most of all, he liked to hear John laugh. Even if Sherlock could only be here a little time more with him, that seemed worthwhile.

But finally he knew he was going to have to bring up the things that were increasingly on his mind, before he ran out of time. “John,” he said. “I have to tell you something.”

John was sitting out on someone’s topiary orange tree. “What?” he said.

Sherlock felt very shy, more shy than he ever had. “It’s—well, John, I think maybe I love you.”

John looked up from the orange blossoms and smiled at him. “Good,” John said, “that’s good. Because I love you too. Saves time, doesn’t it? And perhaps we don’t have much of that.”

Sherlock choked up a bit. “John,” he said. “About that—“

“I’m a _butterfly_ , Sherlock,” John said. “You see the wings.” He waved them. “They’re gorgeous, yeah, but they’re not built to last. Too much flying, they get all raggy. By the fall I’ll look like just one more fallen leaf, all veins and tatters. I’ll make it down country for one migration, overwinter in Florida or Central America, maybe… and that’ll be it.” He cocked an eye at Sherlock. “And you: you’re a hurricane. It’s nearly fall already. Hurricane season’s almost over.” Though the smile he turned on Sherlock then was sad, the brightness behind it changed it somehow. “Just because we won’t have what we’ve got for very long,” he said, “doesn’t mean we can’t have it _now_. Doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.”

Sometimes Sherlock hated being a realist more than usual. “It doesn’t change the fact that we’re going to die, John,” he said at last.

“Well, of course it doesn’t. So why don’t we try something new? Let’s _come back.”_

Sherlock’s eye got wider. “What?”

“Maybe we can. Why don’t we try?”

This was making no sense to Sherlock at all. _“How,_ John??”

John shrugged. “Well, on my side of it, a butterfly’s just a way of making more butterflies,” John said. “And I've been doing that all summer. Now, _I_ may go, but if I try hard enough maybe I’ll find a way to come back as another butterfly. Because if I don’t, then I’ll never meet you again. At least I met you _once_ , and that's good. But it’s been so good that it’s worth trying again. Wouldn’t you say?”

Then Sherlock got all choked up again and worked hard not to cry: which even at the best of times is hard work for a hurricane. _“Yes!_ But how am I supposed to come back? Nobody could be that clever!”

“You could,” John said.

Sherlock looked at John in amazement, and his eye wept involuntary tears of rain all around the edges.

“You’re extraordinary enough to pull it off,” John said. “Especially because it would be _the least dull thing any hurricane ever did.”_

And Sherlock thought about that… and the temperature exchange inside him went all funny at the very idea.

“Let me think,” he said. “Meantime, let's go on as we've been going.”

So on they went as they had been, heading very gently northward. Matters went, of course, as Sherlock had known they would. He had spent too much time close to shore, away from the warm open water that a hurricane needs to keep up its strength: and finally one afternoon he realized his windspeed was dropping off so sharply that he couldn’t keep his eye open any more. “John, you have to hurry and find somewhere safe to hide!” he said. “I’m coming apart.”

“All right,” John said, very sadly. “But Sherlock… remember what you agreed! I want to see you again next year.”

“I want that more than anything,” said Sherlock, and stretched out a last couple of warm breezes to hold John in for a moment.

“Then it’ll happen,” John said. “I love you, Sherlock. And I’ll see you soon.”

“Oh John, I love you too! But you should go hide yourself now—”

“I’m tougher than I look,” John said. “I’ll stay with you.”

And he did. And within half an hour or so Sherlock’s winds unspun themselves and his eye dissolved somewhere over the Poconos, and all his lightnings died. As the temperature differential that drove him evened out, his consciousness dropped over the edge of his interior thermocline and fell away into stillness and darkness and patchy rain. Finally the moon came out over where a hurricane had been, and a light wind from an inshore high started pushing what remained of Sherlock’s outermost charcoal-colored cloud out to sea.

***

The next morning, when the moon set and the sun rose, John woke up and sat quietly where he'd taken refuge the night before, on a staked-up sunflower in someone’s vegetable patch. And he thought hard, because he was very sad for Sherlock, and already missed him dreadfully.

And then he had an idea.

“All right,” he said to himself. “Might take a while. A few months. Maybe longer. But it’s worth a try…”

Methodical as always, John put his plan right into action. He sat there on that half-unseeded sunflower and flapped mightily until he was exhausted: until all he could do was lie for a while with his wings flat out panting for breath. But he didn’t stay there long. John pushed himself up and dragged himself to the next convenient flower and sucked it dry of nectar until he got his strength back, and then he flapped his wings again.

John flapped his wings all that day until he was so tired he could barely move. But then he carefully found himself a hollow in a dead tree to hide in overnight: and the next day when things warmed up again, he sought out some late milkweed blooms and tanked up again, and flew south. John flew steadily for most of the day, and covered a fair number of miles. Then in late afternoon, when the nectar in the flowers was still in fairly good supply, he tanked up again, and sat down on yet another flower, and beat and _beat_ and BEAT his wings. Then when John was tired and it got dark, he rested once more.

When the sun came up the next day, John did the same thing: and again the next day, and the day after, and the day after that. He would drink enough nectar for a good long-distance flight, then fly and fly and fly on south; and after that he’d stop somewhere and spend the day beating his wings, with one specific result in mind. And all the time, John thought quite hard about Sherlock—the flash of his lightning, and his dash and sweep when he moved: the way he sounded when he laughed, and how careful he was about the winds inside his eye, and how he would sometimes tuck a gentle breeze under John’s wings when he needed one. John took those thoughts into his dreams with him every night, and they helped the loneliness.

Finally, when many days had gone by, John made it all the way down to the Florida Keys, where he came to rest at last on a convenient palm frond and spent a while sitting there and gazing out eastward to the sea. He was tired and thin and bedraggled: his wings (as he’d predicted) were all tatty with wear, ragged around the edges, faded by much sun. But John could feel something unusual stirring in the air, and at the feeling of it his spirits rose, for he knew he had one more journey waiting. He found a handy bougainvillea bush, drank every one of its flowers dry, and rested there that night: and then, when the sun rose up over the water, John fluttered up to his palm tree, got his bearings, and then took off and flew straight into the dawn.

***

North or South, the Atlantic can be a dangerous place in the fall and winter, and even in lands surrounded by warmer waters, spring can seem to take a long time coming. But come it does, and summer after it: and in these times of increasingly peculiar weather, no one is particularly surprised when tropical storms start forming in those waters well ahead of what the traditional hurricane season used to be. When one started forming up off the Canary Islands in early June, the local forecasters looked suspiciously at the small tight swirl of it. When its clouds unaccountably flattened and spread themselves out somewhat, and its windspeed suddenly slowed, the European meteorologists still looked at it oddly, but shrugged a little: the water temperatures and the Jet Stream were completely screwed up this year anyway.

What all their radar could not show them was the way the storm began to whirl with sheer delight around something he had had seen beating up toward him from Gran Canaria: a little scrap of orange, a pair of wings that were bright and fresh and new, attached to a monarch butterfly just hatched out no more than a month before. And the breezes in the storm’s warm and widening eye swirled very gently inward to gather the butterfly in and hold it close to the heart of the young hurricane-to-be. Then Sherlock and John laughed together for absolute joy, and did a little spiral dance together directly above the mountains in the Parque National de Tamadaba, while the locals looked up thoughtfully and wondered if it was going to rain.

“I love you so much!” Sherlock said.

“I love you too,” said John, doing a couple of victory rolls in the updraft in the eye, “and I’m so glad what I did worked!”

“You were so clever!” Sherlock said. “How did you manage it?”

John shrugged. “Butterflies are an old symbol of rebirth,” John said. “Comes as standard equipment, apparently. All I had to do was put in a requisition. But I didn’t mean that. I mean _you_.”

Sherlock was mystified. “What?”

“What I did to bring you back,” John said. _“I_ did that.” And he looked very pleased. “Chaos theory.”

 _“What?”_ Sherlock said again.

“Butterflies cause hurricanes,” John said. “Everybody knows that. It’s popular culture. But then you never pay attention to that kind of thing.”

Sherlock was indignant. “John,” he said, “I know the scientific paper you're referencing, and that’s not what Lorentz meant at _all_. He never said that butterflies _cause_ hurricanes. It’s a completely rubbish idea, a purposeful misunderstanding of the concept. If you—”

“Sherlock,” said John, “can I ask you a question?”

“Oh, John,” Sherlock said. “Anything!”

“If butterflies _can’t_ cause hurricanes, how are we having this conversation?”

“Well, obviously, there were more than one set of factors involved in the equation, and as it happens—”

“Sherlock,” John said. “I love you, but if you’re going to tell me I flapped my wings half off my body every day _for nothing,_ you’re going to discover that even a butterfly has a right hook. So _shut up.”_

And quickly Sherlock did, so that John would smile at him again.

“Good.” And John smiled. “Now tell me what _you_ did.” And he banked sideways and settled into a glide.

The two of them moved off together westward over the water, slowly picking up speed: and as they went Sherlock told John what he’d done. It was, even for Sherlock, unusually clever, and the explanation took quite a while. “That’s _fantastic!”_ John said at last.

“But you know,” Sherlock said, looking at his John, “now that I think of it…” And he grinned happily. “Maybe you did it after all.”

And the butterfly laughed with the hurricane as they headed out together into the open sea.

***

As mentioned above, meteorologists have noticed for some years now that hurricane patterns have become atypical. They blame this on all kinds of things: climate change, sunspots, you name it. No one’s certain of the reasons. What they _are_ certain of, though, is that every hurricane season, sooner or later, one tropical depression pops up that’s atypical in a very specific way. It always starts out much more tightly wound than the average run of young hurricanes, and significantly darker: its outer cloud swirls almost charcoal-black around it, though it wears a handsome wrapping of stormcloud blue around its throat, and the inmost sweep of its eyewall cloud flickers fiercely silver-grey with half-hidden lightning. But the really strange thing about this storm is how, once formed, it always seems to demote itself right out of conventional tropical-storm status and spread out its rain bands—raising its barometric pressure, slowing itself down, widening its eye out to a considerable width. And then it wanders northward in the general direction of the Canary Islands, and more or less loiters about as if waiting for something, or someone.

Shortly then, almost as if it’s met whoever it was waiting for, it moves off northwestward again. Other more conventional hurricanes often pass it by, and it’s as if this odd depression is glad to let them pass: as if it has other business. Sometimes it makes landfall only for a day or so before cruising out to sea again, just brushing past the East Coast and dropping a little rain every now and then almost as an afterthought. It always moves up the Atlantic slowly and carefully, its eye kept very wide and calm and open, almost as if the storm was holding something very special and precious at its heart. And eventually when it heads inland for the last time, it rains as gently as possible as if trying to conserve its strength, and at last gradually dissolves in a last few curtains of silver rain that glitter in the sun.

Some people inland have occasionally, after one of these rainstorms is over, reported catching a glimpse of a bright scrap of orange against the sky, a monarch butterfly, slowly but very purposefully making its way southward—apparently very late in the annual migration. And there are those, down in the Florida Keys, who have occasionally reported seeing a single butterfly—the sunset light catching boldly on wings silhouetted against cloud-darkened skies—as, for no one knows what reason, it heads out into the open Atlantic as if it has an appointment to keep.

Year after year this happens, over and over, whether you or I notice it or not. And year after year it will continue to do so, as long as storms still form and wings still beat: because fortunately for us, love—whether we believe in it or not—though it may suffer temporary local setbacks, never actually dies.

Ask the hurricane and the butterfly.


End file.
